Sara Menker is an Entrepreneur and the CEO of Gro Intelligence. She is a trustee of the Mandela Institute for Development Studies and was elected one of the World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders. She has been selected as one of Time Magazines Most Influential People of 2021.
Born and raised in Ethiopia, Sara went on to stuy Economics and African Studies in the USA and then moved to study at the London School of Economics for her graduate studies, and eventually earned an Master of Business Administration at Columbia University.
She became concerned by threat of a global food crisis, and started to investigate how Africa could mitigate the Earth’s growing demands for food. She estimated that by 2030 food shortages could be as significant as the financial crisis or dot-com bubble crash. In 2014 Menker established Gro Intelligence, a data-driven platform which connects food markets around the world and uses artificial intelligence to make predictions about trends in food prices. In 2017 Menker delivered a TED talk A global food crisis may be less than a decade away.
Sara Menker has spent her whole life thinking about disaster. She was raised during the famine that killed more than a million people. Uniquely prepared for the worst, Menker left Wall Street to help prevent it, starting Gro Intelligence to leverage the latest advances in technology to tackle big challenges, including hunger and climate change. As CEO, she helps clients use artificial intelligence and machine learning to convert data on the global agricultural ecosystem into actionable knowledge.
Over the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change have given her plenty to work on as they have revealed how vulnerable people are to crises. By arming people with knowledge, Menker believes humanity can solve its most vexing challenges.
